How Baz got a boon from a big new tax

It looks as though we’re about to find out whether state and federal politics have anything to do with each other. It used to be fairly usual for one side to run things in Canberra while the other got its piece of the cake in several of the states because you didn’t put somebody in a state Parliament to oversee Afghanistan. Or send a person to the federal government because you got caught in a traffic jam.

That may have changed last Saturday, and this isn’t exactly an original idea, since everybody’s been talking about it in the short time the Coalition took for its demolition job in NSW.

When Labor candidates drop like flies, and in record numbers, it’s worth thinking about whether it has implications beyond the fact they’re just a bunch of bumblers, shysters and third-rate drinkers.

That’s in no small part because
Barry O’Farrell
hung his hat on opposition to the carbon tax. It’s a national issue but in a cool way you can bring it down to a local level, which O’Farrell has done.

I don’t understand how this happened any more than I can understand the whole goofy carbon tax, which defies explanation unless you have a degree in physics and a willingness to believe cars are evil.

Julia Gillard
set herself up for this when she turned the whole thing into a shell game. First, she assured everybody we weren’t getting a carbon tax. Fine, most people thought, as long as you weren’t stuck behind a bus (that, in NSW, was already 20 minutes late).

Most of us were opposed to it as soon as we heard the word “tax", which we don’t need any more of right now. Then, in that dumb mistake politicians sometimes make, she tried to redefine the word. It took about a minute or so, but people started to realise she’d come up with a carbon tax.

Ol’ Barry knew a winner when he saw one, plus he was already running against a gang that couldn’t shoot straight. Why not pile it on with some opposition to the carbon tax that really isn’t a carbon tax but sort of, kind of, is? This, combined with turning NSW Labor into toast, was a gift. La Jool is playing this carbon business like an out-of-tune Fender guitar.

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A kind thought for
Kristina Keneally
, who was always in over her head and you couldn’t help but think the party stuck her with the job after they realised the jig was up anyway: she reminded me, during the campaign, of that Hubert Humphrey “happy warrior" type who can smile through a heart transplant. But I’d love to see her I’ll-get-you-if-I-can-some-day list, if she’s got one.

As for Labor in NSW, things couldn’t get much worse, right? That’s the good news. A total demolition job means it has to go back to the drawing board, throw the dingbats out and rearrange what’s left.

The bad news is it’s probably going to have eight years of free time on its hands to do this. And if you’ve ever lived in NSW, you know how the ALP can murder free time, given the opportunity.

Anyway, we’re still left with the question of whether a record-breaker state election can affect politics in Canberra. The answer is a firm, resolute “it depends".

A similar massacre in Western Australia would not but, having spent some time there, I realise it’s a different country. The same “it depends" might go for Queensland, where
Anna Bligh
was heading for palookaville until her strong performance during the floods in January. But what’s that got to do with a carbon tax?

NSW is a different story because it’s the country’s largest state with the country’s biggest problems. When you get a wipeout like the other day’s and it’s partially linked to a federal tax, maybe it’s rethink time. And when you’ve got the kind of majority O’Farrell won, compromise with Canberra isn’t in the big picture.

No matter how you look at it, Gillard is in the same command-and-control position I’m in when the pool needs to be cleaned and nobody else will do it.

She’s got a screwball relationship with the Greens who, unlike her, enjoy screwball relationships. The independents could book out at any time, especially when they look at the NSW results and see the wind may not be blowing their boats.